The development of cloud storage and services has allowed users to offload and/or outsource both storage of their data and associated computations on that data. As a result, businesses can choose to forego the expensive proposition of maintaining their own data centers, relying instead on cloud storage and computational services. In addition to storing data in remote servers, computations can be performed in remote servers as well.
One type of data amenable to cloud storage and computational services is genomic data. The field of genomics involves analyzing the function and structure of genomes, including DNA sequencing and genetic mapping. Human genomic data can be mined to identify variants in genes that can contribute to diseases. However, a large and diverse genomic data set is needed to identify these genetic links. To this end, large databases of genomic data, as well as other types of data, are being established.
Maintaining data confidentiality is an especially important concern for storing data and performing computations on data in remote servers. Encryption schemes represent one form of technology directed towards securing data when stored in memory, when operated on, and/or transmitted over networks.